I’ll be honest, I’ve been a little down recently. I’m not sure what the cause is, since it predates my grandmother’s fall, the loss of evening daylight, and the cool weather, so it’s probably just cyclical, rather than situational this time. But the net result is less reading and less knitting.

However, there’s nothing like the need for blog fodder to inspire picking a new book (I finally finished Flight Behavior last night), and I have a bunch out from the library to choose among. I settled on Deborah Wiles’ Countdown, the first book in her Sixties trilogy. The second book, Revolution, is a National Book Award finalist in this year’s young adult category. Set in 1962 here in D.C., I’m planning to read Countdown while listening to several of the compilations of music from that year that my dad has curated, which seems fitting for a book with a 45 on its cover.

The socks are for Rudi. The yarn is Wild Hare Studio’s Pinnacle Sock in I Want My Zombie, the 8th and final skein of yarn bought at Maryland Sheep & Wool this year. It is, at his request, a 2×2 rib, which is the most boring knitting ever, if you ask me. It’s not totally mindless, like stockinette would be, but it’s also not something that requires focus, so I often find myself floating away and with the wrong number of stitches at the end of a needle. That said, the spiraling stripe, which looks like a zombie’s wrappings (do zombies have wrappings or is that just mummies?), is a lot of fun, and they’re Rudi’s favorite colors, which means he’ll wear them lots when I’m done with them. And it is good knitting for the dark, so I got a lot done by the campfire when we were on vacation, and it’ll also work well for concerts and car rides, should either of those materialize in our future soon.

I know this picture, of a maple starting to turn next to a streetlight, is out of focus, but I like it anyway.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about some of the apples Rudi and I brought home with us from Vermont, and tonight we had tasting #2:

Pictured above (with Welsh cheddar this time), you’ll find the last few slices of (clockwise, from the bottom) Knobbed Russet, Northern Spy, Ashmead’s Kernel, Pristine, and Sheepnose.

Knobbed Russets are particularly ugly apples, misshapen and with unpleasantly rough, bumpy skin, but their outward appearance masks an ideal eating apple, simultaneously sweet and tart and delicious. They were my favorite, followed by Ashmead’s Kernel, the other russet.

Northern Spy (the biggest apple we sampled tonight), is a solid, crisp eating apple and probably the most commonly known of the bunch. You’d be hard-pressed to go wrong selecting this one for munching on.

Pristine, a pretty, yellow apple, was also crunchy, but as its name suggests, had a very clean taste. If a single apple could embody the taste of generic apple juice, this would be it. Nice enough, but not especially memorable.

Sheepnose (which originated in Connecticut around 1800 and is also known as Black Gilliflower) had the best name, but was the most disappointing snack, with a mushy, quick-to-breakdown texture. Now, to be fair to the process, these apples have been sitting on my counter for weeks, so it’s clearly not an ideal environment for softer varieties. And it still had a nice taste that Rudi and I agreed would probably work quite well in a cooked dessert.

This weekend included:

• Halloween: carving pumpkins, chasing down trick-or-treaters who overlooked our basement denizen, dozing through Young Frankenstein
• Sleeping in both days
• Washing the whole can of orange hairspray back out of my hair (except for where I dyed my scalp orange (oops))
• Brunch with friends
• Harvesting the last handfuls of tomatoes and the basil plants from the garden before overnight temps dipped into the 30s
• Watching the first season of Black Books again
• Eating delicious vegetarian stew that Rudi put together from the random veg in our fridge
• Consuming more Halloween candy than was wise
• Hitting up the farmers market (highlights include honeynut squash, quince & pear jam, and what may be the last raspberries of the season)
• Biking up to Petworth to check out a new bookstore on its opening weekend and visiting a well-liked coffeehouse on the way home
• Laundry, including the first load of handwashing of the season
• Knitting and reading

How about you? What were you up to this weekend?

Weekending along with Karen at Pumpkin Sunrise.

Did you have a nice holiday?

We did.

We carved jack o’lanterns. Mine’s on the left:

I decorated my office:

I got dressed up (and, no, you’re right; I’ve used this idea before):

It requires a coat hanger and an entire can of orange hair spray (and the ability to remain calm when half-asleep and unable to remember how to braid after doing it regularly for 33 years):

But it all adds up to a lot of fun!

Did you do anything for Halloween?